(AU) Climate Change Action Stymied By Australian Business Lobby, UK Think Tank Finds

ABC News - Elysse Morgan


Extended interview with Edward Collins (Elysse Morgan)

Key Points A new report finds the Minerals Council of Australia is the "single largest negative influence on Australian climate-related policy" The Business Council of Australia, two state-based minerals councils and the main oil and gas lobby group are also fingered in the report InfluenceMap, which wrote the report, has previously found Australia's climate policies are consistent with a 3-4 degrees Celsius temperature rise

A UK-based climate think tank has named the Minerals Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the NSW Minerals Council as the three organisations most responsible for undermining climate policy in Australia.

Mining giants BHP, Santos, Rio Tinto and Glencore were found to have the most concentrated network of links to industry associations that "continue to work against Paris-aligned policy for Australia".

The new report was written by InfluenceMap, which was launched shortly before the Paris Agreement in 2015 and provides data and analysis to major shareholders and investors on how businesses are affecting climate policy around the world.

It is a think tank funded by environmentally focused charities and organisations, including the IKEA Foundation and the European Union.

The report into Australia's industry associations and their climate policy footprint finds three-quarters of Australia's most influential industry associations are having an overwhelmingly negative impact on climate policy, taking positions against climate regulations and promoting a pro-fossil-fuels agenda.

The report also argues there has been limited public scrutiny of these activities.

Minerals Council 'single largest negative influence'

InfluenceMap looked at 20 industry associations — including the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the NSW and Queensland minerals councils, and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) — based on their active involvement in climate and energy policy.

The report cites the MCA's recent advocacy for reduced taxes and faster project approval for mining, its opposition to strong international climate commitments, and its calls to water down clean-energy targets as some of the evidence against it.

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10 years of climate policy inertia

Ten years ago one man's plan blew apart Australia's two great parties irrevocably just as they teetered toward consensus on climate change, the most divisive issue of the Australian political century. Read more 

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It highlights the BCA's push for the Government to support gas as part of the energy transition, that it has opposed renewable-energy policies in favour of "technology-neutral" policies and lobbied against state-based renewables targets.

The report notes the Minerals Council of Australia is the "single largest negative influence on Australian climate-related policy", while the BCA was named as the fourth biggest drag.

This is perhaps surprising given the BCA states publicly: "We support the need for a market-based carbon price to drive the transition and incentivise investment in low and no-emissions technology."

It also says it supports the science of climate change, the Paris Agreement, and investment in technology to get Australia to a net-zero-emissions future.

But the InfluenceMap report finds, despite the positive public statements it has made, the group's actions show it "continues to oppose Paris-aligned climate policy".

Shareholder pressure ramping up

The report comes as activists and shareholder groups increase their pressure on companies, demanding boards take a more active approach to reducing emissions and review the lobby groups they belong to.

As a result of shareholder pressure, BHP has reviewed its membership of organisations such as the BCA and MCA every year since 2017.

Just last month, BHP announced new global climate policy standards, including national emissions reduction targets consistent with the Paris Agreement, and further scrutiny of its lobby group membership.

It faces a vote at its annual general meeting on a recommendation the mining giant suspends memberships of industry associations that have advocated for COVID-19 economic stimulus measures inconsistent with the Paris Agreement's goals.

BHP's board has not endorsed the item, stating: "It does not take account of recent changes to BHP's approach to industry associations." The mining giant is aiming to make changes from within the tent.

In August it adopted policy positions, including net-zero emissions by 2050, and indicated it expected its positions to be reflected by associations it was a member of.

However, "the Big Australian" fares poorly in InfluenceMap's analysis.

"BHP has done a lot on the transparency front recently and I'm sure investors will see that as a positive step, but this assessment is really looking at them and their impact," report author Edward Collins told ABC's The Business.

"So that ranking for BHP is really coming from the fact that they have the largest network of links to industry associations that we judge to be the most negatively influential in Australia and, although we factor in the fact that they have distanced themselves from some of those positions, they've still come out as the worst in our analysis due to the strength and number of those links."

As with BHP, Rio Tinto is also facing shareholder pressure, as is Woodside Energy, which is Australia's largest oil and gas producer.

COVID-19 response highlights transparency problems

The analysis does not include the policy response to the pandemic and, in particular, the "gas-led recovery" pushed by energy sector veterans Nev Power and Andrew Liveris, who sit on the Federal Government's hand-picked economic advisory panel.

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Gas-fired path to COVID recovery?

The Federal Government's National COVID Coordination Commission has a lot of gas industry players involved, and it appears to be showing in its policy recommendations. Read more

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Mr Collins said the Government's urgent response to the need for stimulus out of COVID-19, and the potential for influential lobby groups to direct policy, only increased the need for transparency.

"One thing we are quite keen on is more meaningful transparency measures so external parties can understand the relationships between companies and government policy institutions and how these influences are taking place," he said.

"It would hopefully make our job redundant in the future."

InfluenceMap's 2019 report found Australian representative groups featured disproportionately among the world's most damaging lobbyists on climate.

According to a consortium of science institutes behind the Climate Action Tracker, Australia is headed for an 8 per cent increase in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, which would be aligned with global a temperature increase between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius if replicated globally.

Links

• In the fraught field of energy policy, Scott Morrison is taking the middle ground
• Federal Government threatens to build gas plant if electricity sector doesn't replace retiring coal-fired power stations
• Offsetting your emissions: Greenwashing or a win for the environment?
• Investors are trying to shut down fossil fuel companies from the inside — this is what they're doing
• (AU) Narrabri Gas Project Should Be Blocked, Says Ex-Chief Scientist
• (AU) Australia’s Shifting Mood On Climate Change
• (AU) Climate Change Policy: The Missing Middle
• The businesses that are — and are not — leading on climate change
• Top oil firms spending millions lobbying to block climate change policies, says report

Pakistan’s Most Terrifying Adversary Is Climate Change

New York Times - Fatima Bhutto

The country debates women’s honor inexhaustibly but pays little attention to the ferocious and imminent dangers of climate disasters.

Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan, was flooded in August after the heaviest rains in decades. Credit...Shahzaib Akber/EPA, via Shutterstock

Author Fatima Bhutto, an essayist and novelist from Pakistan, is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Runaways".

Karachi is home. My bustling, chaotic city of about 20 million people on the Arabian Sea is an ethnically and religiously diverse metropolis and the commercial capital of Pakistan, generating more than half of the country’s revenue.

Over the decades, Karachi has survived violent sectarian strife, political violence between warring groups claiming the city and terrorism. Karachi has survived its gangsters sparring with rocket launchers; its police force, more feared than common criminals; its rulers and bureaucrats committed to rapacious, bottomless corruption. Now Karachi faces its most terrifying adversary: climate change.

In August, Karachi’s stifling summer heat was heavy and pregnant. The sapodilla trees and frangipani leaves were lush and green; the Arabian Sea, quiet and distant, had grown muddy. When the palm fronds started to sway, slowly, the city knew the winds had picked up and rain would follow. Every year the monsoons come — angrier and wilder — lashing the unprepared city. Studies show that climate change is causing monsoons to be more intense and less predictable, and cover larger areas of land for longer periods of time.

On Aug. 27, Karachi received nearly nine inches of monsoon rain, the highest amount of rainfall ever in a single day. Nineteen inches of rain fell in August, according to the meteorological officials. It is enough to drown a city that has no functioning drainage, no emergency systems and no reliable health care (except for those who can pay). Thousands of homes and settlements of the poor were subsumed and destroyed, and more than 100 people were killed.

A traders association estimated that the submerging of markets and warehouses damaged goods worth 25 billion Pakistani rupees, or about $150 million. Local papers estimated that with Karachi at a standstill for a week, in some congested areas for longer, Pakistan’s gross domestic product suffered daily losses of $449 million — a number that didn’t include the enormous informal economy. The World Bank estimates that 15 percent of gross domestic product of the Sindh province (Karachi is its capital) is lost every year to environmental damage and climate change.

Pakistan is the fifth most climate vulnerable nation in the world. Between 1998 and 2018, according to the Global Climate Risk Index, the country is estimated to have lost nearly 10,000 lives to climate-related disasters and suffered losses amounting to about $4 billion from 152 extreme weather events in that period. Analysts have estimated Pakistan’s climate migrants over the past decade at around 30 million people.

A funeral being held in Karachi, Pakistan, in August for some victims of the flood caused by relentless monsoon rains. Credit...Fareed Khan/Associated Press

There is no end to the catalog of climate disasters affecting my country. The glaciers in the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas and the Karakoram in northern Pakistan are melting at an accelerated pace. If the emission trends and temperature rises continue unabated, these mountains could lose between a third to two-thirds of their ice fields by 2100. The result will be catastrophic: By 2050, the increased melting will result in landslides, heavy flooding, dam bursts and soil erosion. After the glaciers have melted away, drought and famine will follow.

The terror of our coming era will be born of heat and fire and ice. Some years ago, I was in a village in Sindh after a massive flood had devastated it. Thousands were displaced overnight. The blistering heat soaked the faces of displaced young women in sweat thick like glycerin. I was unsure what would be more lethal — the drowning or the heat.

Not far from that drowned village in Sindh is the city of Jacobabad, where temperatures in the summer run as high as 124 degrees Fahrenheit. It is the hottest city in Asia, if not the world. Jacobabad has long electricity blackouts. Its poor die as they toil in the fields.

Temperature increases have brought plague after plague in rural areas. This year has brought Pakistan the most devastating locust infestations in nearly 30 years. The insects destroyed entire harvests, causing the government to call a national emergency as winter crops were decimated, resulting in losses of $2.5 billion. The locusts descend like a haze, so thick that from a distance it looked like a soft pink fog. Because of heavy rains and cyclones, there has been unprecedented breeding of locusts in the United Arab Emirates. They traveled to us from the Arabian Peninsula.

This is a climate war between the large industrial superpowers, financial predators that have polluted and poisoned our planet for profit, and the poor, who have done the least damage but will pay all of the consequences. Pakistan is responsible for less than 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but its people will bear the burden of the world’s deadliest polluters. If nothing is done to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Bank, 800 million people in South Asia will be at risk of amplified poverty, homelessness and hunger.

The World Bank has identified Karachi as one the planet’s climate hot spots. Temperatures across South Asia are estimated to rise by 3.9 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 30 years. Karachi is already struggling with poor road connectivity, dire educational facilities and limited market access. Its already pathetic public health system will plummet. The rich might buy generators for electricity, pay for water tanks and rely on expensive hospitals, but the poor will continue to be devastated.

Pakistan’s current government is speaking about climate change, but it is a conversation that has come too late, unaccompanied by serious action. In 1947, Pakistan was 33 percent forest. Today, we have tree cover of just about 4 percent, all because of deforestation. This destruction, largely caused by the illegal logging by timber mafias, has silted up our waterways and left us undefended against floods and storms.

The country can easily be whipped into hysteria over supposed religious infractions committed by minorities and can debate women’s modesty and honor inexhaustibly, but it has little attention for the ferocious and imminent dangers of climate change.

Karachi’s rainfall, like the rising temperatures, is a consequence of the raging climate war. We have sat by and watched how cities die: slowly. We didn’t watch closely enough when the villages sank and struggled. But it is clear now that this is how a planet burns, one fire at a time, one degree hotter until eventually all that remains will be the chalky bones of Karachi’s ancient saints, buried on disappeared cliffs.

Links

• Pakistan 5th most vulnerable country to climate change, reveals Germanwatch report
• United Nations Development Programme Climate Change Adaptation: Pakistan 
• Wikipedia: Climate change in Pakistan
• Asian Development Bank: Climate Change Profile Of Pakistan
• Pakistan: Climate change, environmental problems put government in a bind 
• Pakistan is ground zero for global warming consequences
• A Water Crisis Looms For 270 Million People As South Asia’s Glaciers Shrink

Climate Primer: How To Talk About Climate Change

Reuters - Laurie Goering

Want to have a productive conversation about climate risk? Be respectful, look for common ground and always offer solutions, says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe

LONDON - Climate change-related threats - from record wildfires to worsening heatwaves, floods and storms - are affecting more and more people around the world. So why aren't we acting on the increasingly evident changes around us?

One reason is too many people still see climate change as a faraway threat - one their children or grandchildren, people in distant countries or polar bears will face, but not one that will hit them personally, or that needs attention now.

Others are simply too busy to give the issue much attention - or they understand the deadly risks but don't know how to act effectively to reduce them. Depressed and frightened, they switch off engaging.

"For most of us, scaring the pants off us doesn't move us forward. It causes us to freeze. That's how our brains are hard-wired," says Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and climate communication expert at Texas Tech University.

So how do we get more people to understand and engage with climate risks in a productive way, so the threats can be reduced?

Hayhoe says it's as simple as talking to others - not about climate change but about the things they care about, whether it's less snow on the ski slopes, saving money on fuel bills or keeping asthmatic kids safe when forest fire smoke spreads.

"Talking about it is so powerful," she said. "Our voice is a massively underestimated agent of change. We all have a voice we can use in some way."

Hayhoe should know: As the wife of an evangelical Christian pastor, a resident of hugely conservative Lubbock, Texas, and someone who regularly engages with climate change doubters on social media, she has the conversations every day.

Here are her top tips for having a productive conversation about climate change, from a Reuters online event with her this week:

Start with your own communities

Whether you're a football fan or a parent, a diving enthusiast or a knitter, talking to people you know, spend time with and share interests with is likely where you'll have the best conversations.

If you're an atheist, trying to engage church-goers about obligations in scripture to protect the earth isn't likely to get you very far, Hayhoe notes.

Search for common ground

Maybe you're both gardeners battling new pests and diseases in your roses, or parents of teenagers wanting to ditch school on Fridays to attend climate protests. People are more inclined to listen to others they see as like themselves.

"You have to get to know them, what makes them tick, what incentivises them, what they get really excited about," she said. "Then connect the dots to climate change."

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe joins Reuters to discuss to discuss climate change, our ability to tackle the challenge and whether society can adapt to a warming planet.

Talk about their concerns - not just climate change

Don't start off with a lecture. Listen and look for opportunities to talk about how global warming may be affecting their concerns.

Perhaps you're both worried that heatwaves are making it harder for you to run the marathons you love, or that the lengthening allergy season means your children need to take more medicine.

"Don't hit people with facts," Hayhoe said. "Show why it matters to them in the places where they live - and what people are already doing to fix this problem."

Start with mutual respect - don't judge what they say or do

You may be a devoted cyclist concerned by their passion for SUVs, but keeping an open mind, listening and maintaining genuine respect is crucial to helping the other person do the same and consider what you have to say.

Don't "wave a bony finger of judgment at someone," Hayhoe warns.

Always offer solutions and action

Helping someone understand the scale of the climate crisis - and then leaving them with nothing to do about it - is debilitating and unhelpful, Hayhoe says.

If the person you're speaking with runs a clubhouse or other facility, talk about how installing solar panels could save operating cash.

Chat about good, high-earning alternatives to investing pension funds in fossil fuels, or offer to accompany drivers to try out safe bicycle routes.

Encourage them to contact elected representatives about their concerns, or join a community effort to protect forests or cut food waste.

"Action is the antidote to anxiety and despair," she said. "If we present the risks without what we can do about it, we’re doing people a disservice."

 Accept that some people simply won't listen

Surveys of U.S. attitudes toward climate change by the Yale Program on Climate Communications show nearly 60% of people are either "alarmed" or "concerned" about the problem.

But at the other end of the spectrum are the 10% of Americans "dismissive" of climate risks.

"We all have an uncle or a cousin or an old college roommate or a neighbour" who falls into that category - someone whose identity is bound up with rejecting that climate change is real or a worry, Hayhoe said.

In those cases, "if an angel from God appeared in front of them with brand new tablets of stone saying global warming is real… they would dismiss them too," she said.

How to engage with such people on climate issues? It's best not to bother, she says. The other 90% of people are out there, and may be more ready to listen and engage than you think.

Links

• The 12 Arguments Every Climate Denier Uses – And How To Debunk Them
• 'Not seeing the urgency': Communications failure blamed for climate inaction
• Climate primer: Why is everyone talking about 'net zero'?
• 'Cranky Uncle' game offers a vaccination against climate disinformation
• The five corrupt pillars of climate change denial
• Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?
• We just had the hottest year on record – where does that leave climate denial?
• Climate denial: Donald Trump mimics criminal behaviour when justifying his stance
• IPCC: The Dirty Tricks Climate Scientists Faced In Three Decades Since First Report
• After Two Years Of School Strikes, The World Is Still In A State Of Climate Crisis Denial
• What Facebook And The Oil Industry Have In Common
• Facebook Creates Fact-Checking Exemption For Climate Deniers
• Climate denial hasn’t gone away – here’s how to spot arguments for delaying climate action
• (AU) The Number Of Climate Deniers In Australia Is More Than Double The Global Average, New Survey Finds
• How Much Do People Around The World Care About Climate Change? We Surveyed 80,000 People In 40 Countries To Find Out

The 12 Arguments Every Climate Denier Uses – And How To Debunk Them

VICE - Imogen West-Knights

"But what about China?"

Photo: David Cliff/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

In Europe, you don’t often rub shoulders with someone who doesn’t believe in climate change. Although climate change denial is alive and well in America – not least in the White House – people here mostly accept that climate change is, to some degree, happening.

But that doesn’t mean climate denialism has gone away. Instead, according to new research from the University of Cardiff, it has simply changed shape, into something they call “discourses of delay”.

These 12 arguments, favoured by politicians and industry figures, are a more subtle way of downplaying the need for action on climate change than full-on denialism, but no less corrosive to efforts to mitigate damaging climate effects. And they’re filtering into the public consciousness rapidly.

Rather than arguing that climate change isn’t happening, now you hear people arguing that it’s too late, too difficult, too controversial, too unfair, too hasty, to take serious action on climate change.

How do you debunk these arguments when you hear them? Tackling these types of misinformation is no mean feat; often they’re put forward in good faith.

But explaining to someone the fallacies behind these common discourses of delay can work as what Dr. William Lamb, one of the authors of the Cardiff paper, calls an “inoculation strategy” against future misinformation on climate change.

Here are their 12 discourses of delay, and what you can say to challenge them.

1.	“Ultimately, it’s individuals and consumers who are responsible for taking action”

This narrative first came from the fossil fuel industry. “They funded carbon footprint calculators,” Dr John Cook, a research professor at the Centre for Climate Change Communication, tells me, “and my hat off to them for coming up with an incredibly effective PR strategy to distract the public from the real need, to transform how we create energy.”

It’s not pointless to try to avoid plastic, or to limit your meat consumption but we’ll never convince everybody to do that, plus there are socio-economic reasons why it isn’t possible for everyone. Even if we did, it would be like trying to drain the ocean with a pipette compared to systemic change in polluting industries. One hundred companies are responsible for 71 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

2.	“The UK’s carbon footprint is tiny compared to China’s, so it doesn’t make sense for us to take action, at least until they do”

The report calls this “whataboutism”. The farming industry points the finger at the car industry, and vice versa. Politicians point out that their nation’s global carbon dioxide output is only small (in the UK it’s between 1 and 2 percent of the world total) and so justify inaction.

Firstly, every country could make a version of this argument, and if they did, there would be no hope to limit climate change.

Secondly, that 1 to 2 percent figure is misleading, because per capita emissions in the UK are relatively high – about five times as high as India's, for instance.

Thirdly, as a technologically and economically advanced nation, we are more able to take action than many other nations, and we have an additional historical responsibility to do so as a country that has polluted a great deal in the past.

3.	“But if we start to reduce emissions, other countries will just take advantage of that to increase their emissions”

You can challenge the narrative that we are necessarily giving something up by lowering our carbon emissions.

“There are a lot of benefits to be gained in our everyday lives from mitigating climate change, in terms of reducing local air pollution, more active travel, not spending so much money on fuel bills and so on,” says Lamb.

4.	“People are developing new, green technology right now, we just need to wait for it”

If only. The aviation industry is particularly good at manipulating this argument, so good in fact that Matt Hancock recently claimed that “electric planes are on the horizon”.

They aren’t. Or maybe they will be, in several decades time, but the IPCC finding is that we need to half our emissions in the next ten years.

“You have to demonstrate that these technologies are going to be available in the timeframe that matters,” says Lamb, and at present, climate friendly planes are a pie in the sky.

5.	“We’ve already declared a climate emergency and set ambitious targets”

Targets are emphatically not policies. As a global community, we are extremely bad at meeting environmental targets. Earlier this month, it was announced that humanity has missed every single one of the 2010 Aichi goals to protect world wildlife and ecosystems.

6.	“We need to work with fossil fuel companies, their fuel is becoming more efficient and we’ll need them as a stopgap before widespread renewable energy use in the future”

This kind of greenwashing is “at the heart of industry pushback against regulation”, says the Cardiff report. It is not a foregone conclusion that we need fossil fuels for now in order to transition into using renewables in the future:

“We can leapfrog it straight to renewables,” Cook tells me.

And we don’t have the time for a gentle climb down from fossil fuels: it’s ten years.

7.	“People respond best to voluntary policies, and we shouldn’t try to force people to do anything”

Or in other words, what we need is carrots, not sticks. Things like funding high-speed rail to substitute flights, and not frequent flyer levies.

But restrictive measures are a normal and accepted part of life already. Seatbelts, for instance, are a restrictive measure enforced by law for the safety of drivers and their passengers, and the car industry pushed back against them hard when they were introduced.

They also can and should be used in conjunction with incentives, it’s not an either/or.

8.	“Taking action on climate change will generate huge social costs. The most vulnerable people in our society will suffer the most from increased taxation”

These are legitimate concerns if put forward in good faith. But, as Cook says, often this is “a straw man argument attacking a basically non-existent version of climate policies,” which are often designed with social justice in mind to ensure that this doesn't happen.

In any case, you don’t have to increase taxation on the poorest people in society to mitigate climate change. Reducing the cost of train tickets is a good example. And frequent flier levies are a tax on the wealthiest people in our society, who by definition can afford it.

The most vulnerable in society are also the most negatively affected in terms of their health by continuing to burn fossil fuels – coal plants are near poorer parts of the country – and so in fact have the most to gain from green policy.

9.	“Abandoning fossil fuels would slow the growth that has lifted billions of people out of poverty”

Unfortunately, this argument is often a leveraging of human suffering to protect the interests of fossil fuel giants. If we actually cared about the plight of these people, we would be providing renewable energy technology patent free. And fossil fuels are already causing drastic damage to lives in the global south.

10.	“We shouldn’t act until we’re sure we’ve got perfectly-crafted policies to address climate change”

We are more sure about the impacts and future risks of climate change than we are about cigarettes harming human health, and yet we enact policy to limit people smoking.

We don’t need total certainty about outcomes to commit to climate policy, and we don’t require it in any other field of big government decisions, for example, going to war or, dare I say it, exiting the European Union.

Taking decisive action on climate change is going to cause a great deal less suffering than either of those examples.

11.	“Any effective measure to reduce emissions would run counter to human nature and the way we live now, and so it would be impossible to implement in a democratic society”

This is a difficult one, to be fair. We have failed, so far, to change the way we live enough to avert climate disaster. But searching for a way through the challenges is not as impossible as this argument makes it seem.

One way to counter this argument, Lamb says, is to look at historical analogies, social justice or civil rights movements, for instance, which have successfully “shifted opinion and shifted policies in the past”.

12.	“It’s too late to prevent catastrophic climate change and we should get ready to adapt or die”

Climate change is not a binary, of either having climate change or not. “We have already committed ourselves to some climate impacts” says Cook, “but it's not locked in just how bad it will be.”

You could also argue that there’s a moral failing in taking this view. We in Western Europe, or North America aren’t the first or the most severely affected by climate change, and giving up is giving up on all the people who don’t happen to live where we do.

Links

• The five corrupt pillars of climate change denial
• Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?
• We just had the hottest year on record – where does that leave climate denial?
• Climate denial: Donald Trump mimics criminal behaviour when justifying his stance
• IPCC: The Dirty Tricks Climate Scientists Faced In Three Decades Since First Report
• After Two Years Of School Strikes, The World Is Still In A State Of Climate Crisis Denial
• What Facebook And The Oil Industry Have In Common
• Facebook Creates Fact-Checking Exemption For Climate Deniers
• Climate denial hasn’t gone away – here’s how to spot arguments for delaying climate action
• (AU) The Number Of Climate Deniers In Australia Is More Than Double The Global Average, New Survey Finds
• How Much Do People Around The World Care About Climate Change? We Surveyed 80,000 People In 40 Countries To Find Out

How Many People Will Migrate Due To Rising Sea Levels? Our Best Guesses Aren’t Good Enough

The Conversation - Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson | Celia McMichael | Ilan Kelman | Shouro Dasgupta

Many villages in coastal Bangladesh are struggling with erosion of land, homes and crops. Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson, Author provided 

Authors Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson Senior Researcher, Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), United Nations University Celia McMichael Senior Lecturer in Geography, University of Melbourne Ilan Kelman Professor of Disasters and Health, UCL Shouro Dasgupta Lecturer in Environmental Economics, Università Ca'Foscari

An article in 2011 shocked many by suggesting that up to 187 million people could be forced to leave their homes as a result of two metres of sea level rise by 2100.

Almost a decade on, some of the latest estimates suggest that as many as 630 million people may live on land below projected annual flood levels for the end of the century.

The idea that rising seas will force millions to move, unleashing a refugee crisis like no other, has now become commonplace. It’s a narrative that the media are fond of, but that does not mean it is based on evidence.

The potential scale of sea level rise is becoming clearer, but this does not necessarily translate into population movements. Everything we have learned so far suggests that decisions to migrate are far more complex than a simple flight response.

In our new review article, we looked at 33 different studies that have estimated how sea level rise will affect migration patterns. Reliable estimates are important to help support vulnerable populations, but there is deep uncertainty around the amount of people who will be exposed to rising seas, and how they will respond.

Trapped populations

We looked carefully at the methods and data sets of these studies to try and tease out uncertainties. One issue plaguing their estimates is assumptions about the number of people who will be living in vulnerable low-lying areas in the future.

Most of the studies we reviewed did note that the connections between migration and sea level rise are incredibly complex. Every person directly affected isn’t guaranteed to move away as a result. People may be just as likely to try and protect their homes against the water, by building sea walls or elevating their houses.

It’s impossible to predict how each person will respond, and there are countless reasons why someone might choose to stay in the place they call home rather than move or seek shelter elsewhere. Those who may be forced to migrate and resettle due to climate change receive far more attention than those left behind.

These so-called “trapped” populations can be just as vulnerable as those on the move, if not more so.

Despite flooding and erosion, many of the Bangladeshis we interviewed said they cannot or do not want to leave their home villages. Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson, Author provided

Research suggests that the decision to stay or leave will have as much to do with emotional and social pressures as financial or practical reasons. People may feel afraid or find it unbearable to leave, while others lack the necessary support. Many may feel obliged to stay due to binding social ties and reponsibilities.

How the health and wellbeing of those staying behind will be affected by rising seas is poorly investigated. More research is needed to understand the realities of staying put, for those who choose to stay and those who are unable to leave.

Where do we go from here?

Research on sea level rise and migration has often tried to obtain global estimates of those likely to be affected. These are useful for drawing attention to the potential scale of future impacts, but they lack local insights that could help make the picture clearer for different areas.

Rising sea levels are just one of the many ways climate change is remaking our world. Understanding how sea level rise interacts with other environmental changes, such as increased temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will be important, but this stretches the ability to predict exact migration numbers.

A young girl watches as a group of men return home from a fishing trip. Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson, Author provided

Despite all the unknowns, we do know that coastal changes wrought by climate change will be significant, and they require action now. That means devising measures to prevent or reduce inundation, figuring out how to live with the water, and planning for successful ways to migrate and resettle.

Evaluating options, developing scenarios, and making decisions around this must happen now, rather than waiting for the issue to become more urgent. It is just as important to avoid repeating myths around climate change triggering vast flows of people from the so-called “Global South” seeking refuge in the so-called “Global North”.

We do know that people will not inevitably flee across borders in a warming world. Where migration does happen, movements within countries are often neglected on the likely flawed assumption that most migrants are crossing borders.

The narratives create unnecessary concern while shifting focus away from what really matters – helping vulnerable people.

Not only do these myths reproduce xenophobic and outdated colonial power relations based on unfounded arguments, but they also create unnecessary fear and hostile environments for migrant populations around the world.

Links

• More Than 1 Billion People Face Displacement By 2050: Report
• The Great Climate Migration
• UN Ruling Could Be A Game-Changer For Climate Refugees And Climate Action
• Report Shows 2019 Global Climate Problems
• (AU) Too Hot For Humans? First Nations People Fear Becoming Australia's First Climate Refugees
• Climate Change Poses A ‘Direct Threat’ To Australia’s National Security. It Must Be A Political Priority
• Extreme Sea Level Events ‘Will Hit Once A Year By 2050’
• Melting Antarctic Ice Will Raise Sea Level By 2.5 Metres – Even If Paris Climate Goals Are Met, Study Finds
• NASA-Led Ice Melt Study Makes A Terrifying Prediction About Rising Sea Levels
• More Than Half Of World's Oceans Already Being Affected By Climate Change
• (AU) Flooding Could Occur Daily In Sydney By The End Of This Century Because Of Climate Change

(AU) What ScoMo Means By ‘Transition’: A Quick Guide To Climate Change Spin

Crikey - David Hardaker

The prime minister's words promoting fossil fuels are loaded with meaning — they just don't mean what they say.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas) 

Scott Morrison is very much at home spinning the story for the fossil-fuel industry, with phrases like “gas-led recovery” and “transition fuel” leading his government’s messaging to sell the case for gas.

The term “transition” is rich in the promise of better days to come. For a government wrenched away from coal, the messaging speaks of a commitment to change — the idea that “we’ve heard your concerns and we’re acting”.

At the same time “transition” is utterly meaningless if you don’t know how long it will take to get where we’re going — or even where the destination is.

Like much of Australia’s messaging on climate change, the messaging on gas is largely the product of American industry bodies and think tanks. The idea of gas being a “transition fuel” or a “bridge” to renewables has been around since the 1990s, crafted by the American Gas Association as more evidence emerged on global warming.

In her new book, The Carbon Club, journalist Marian Wilkinson traces the influence of US fossil-fuel bodies to 1997 when representatives from the Frontiers of Freedom foundation arrived in Canberra to help spin public debate in the run-up to the Kyoto climate summit. 

Frontiers of Freedom was, according to Wilkinson, supported by some of the wealthiest men in America. Its aim was to sow doubt on whether the world really needed a new global agreement to protect the planet from climate change. It adopted messaging developed by the US Global Climate Coalition to attack Kyoto: “It’s not global and it won’t work.”

Later, America’s Peabody Energy came up with the messaging that energy poverty, not climate change, was “the world’s number one human and environmental crisis”.

© Provided by Crikey

Peabody first used that in 2011 and used it to great effect in the lead-up to the 2014 Brisbane G20 summit as US President Barack Obama pressed the case for change.

Wilkinson reports that Peabody’s “Advanced Energy for Life” campaign was designed by the global lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller.  It peddled the idea that millions of the world’s poor would be trapped in “energy poverty” without access to today’s “advanced clean coal technologies”. It was a powerful humanitarian appeal, even to the sceptics.

But this year — in Australia and the US — it’s all about spinning the gas story.

In January the American Petroleum Institute, the largest US trade association for the oil and gas industry, unveiled its campaign going into a US election year to sell the case for gas — or “natural gas” as the industry successfully branded it decades ago.

(API  has form stretching back to the late 1990s. The  New York Times obtained its communications plan showing it was working to promote “uncertainty” about climate change science and links to fossil fuels.)

The API’s current campaign, “Energy for Progress”, frames gas as central to solving the issue of climate change. The messaging is distilled into eight words, no doubt thoroughly tested in focus groups: “Powering progress through cleaner, reliable and affordable energy.”

American gas (and oil) companies are, it claims, researching “better climate solutions to create a cleaner, stronger tomorrow”.

The human story — because there always has to be a human story to sell the pitch — is of business owners in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, who are hailing the economic benefits of “natural gas production”, spurring “strong and lasting growth in revenues, wages and land values”.

Reuters reports API has spent an estimated US$3.1 million on TV ads promoting gas between January 1 and August 16. In the three weeks after Joe Biden’s climate announcement on July 14 — in which he opposed the use of gas — API had increased its spending on Facebook ads to an estimated average of US$24,000 a day, six times its average daily spending in the preceding six months.

Those who spin for gas have hammered the “clean” (and “natural”) message for decades, even though gas cannot actually be clean, in the way wind or solar are.

In Australia, and in the time of COVID-19, Morrison has given the API’s message a tweak to turn “a stronger tomorrow” into “a gas-led recovery”, neatly hitting the notes of progress, the future and strength. A little like “transition” itself.

“Language has been used very effectively as a weapon to obscure the issues,” chief executive of the Climate Council Amanda McKenzie tells Crikey. “Clean coal, carbon capture and storage are other examples — and gas is the latest iteration.

“Today there is ‘clean hydrogen’ which actually means hydrogen made from gas rather than hydrogen made from renewables.”

Said often enough, Morrison’s “transition” and “gas-led recovery” soon become part of the public discourse — a triumph of sorts for industry spin.

McKenzie warns: “The most dangerous thing about it is when journalists and activists start to use the language without questioning it.”

Links

• Vulnerable Australians will bear the brunt of climate change unless we act
• (AU) Cowardice: What Morrison And Albanese Have In Common On Climate
• (AU) Morrison Says You're Either For Gas Or Against It. Of Course It's Not As Simple As That
• (AU) ‘A Dose Of Reality’: Morrison Government’s New $1.9 Billion Techno-Fix For Climate Change Is A Small Step
• (AU) Critics Say Scott Morrison's New Power Plan Is A Recipe For 'Gas-Fuelled Climate Collapse'
• (AU) Scott Morrison's Power Plan Is Nothing But A Gas-Fuelled Calamity
• (AU) Australian Bushfires: How The Morrison Government Failed To Heed Warnings Of Catastrophe
• (AU) Four Corners: Climate Wars
• Morrison Government Cuts Funds To Australian-German Energy Transition Hub

David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet Review – Stark Climate Emergency Warning

The Guardian - Cath Clarke

This terrifying documentary looks back over the 93-year-old’s career – but at its heart is a short, sharp, shocking lesson

The clock is ticking for planet Earth … Attenborough in the Maasai Mara, Kenya. Photograph: Conor McDonnell/WWF-UK

‘I am David Attenborough and I’m 93. This is my witness statement.”

There is a tremendously moving sense of finality about Attenborough’s terrifying new documentary on the climate emergency.

It is being marketed as a retrospective, a look back at his life and 60-years-plus career.

But make no mistake about its true agenda: Attenborough is here to deliver a stark warning that time is ticking for the planet.

It is a personal film – and political, too. There is emotion and urgency in that familiar soothing voice. At one point he rubs his eyes, reddened and damp.


You could rename it The Dying Planet, a short, sharp, shocking 80-minute lesson on global heating. There is an obligatory dramatisation of Attenborough as a boy in short trousers collecting fossils. And, of course, clips from the BBC of him as a hearty young man rolling around with baby gorillas in Rwanda.

What he didn’t know then, he says mournfully, was how much damage we were inflicting on the planet. “The forests and seas were already emptying.”

The statistics on the screen are brutal. The “before” and “after” footage is even worse. Before: orangutans swinging through the rainforest in Borneo. After: no forest, a single orangutan attempting to clamber up a branchless tree trunk.

But, just when you think the film is bludgeoning you with bleakness, Attenborough lets the light in.

His message in the final 30 minutes is that it’s not too late if we act now. Halt the growth in the world’s population. Create no-fishing zones. Stop eating meat. It’s not about saving the planet, it’s about saving ourselves.

It occurred to me afterwards: what happens when Attenborough is no longer around to coax us out from behind the sofa?

He is a one-man Extinction Rebellion.

• David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, Netflix October 4.

Links

• David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet Trailer
• WWF - Attenborough: A life on our planet
• Netflix - David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
• David Attenborough to publish 'witness statement' on climate crisis
• The real David Attenborough
• The Guardian view on Planet Earth: its life in our hands
• David Attenborough Instagram
• Lethal Heating: David Attenborough Posts